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Introduction:

The Three Regimes of the Novel

One peculiarity of novels when they first arrived in the eighteenth century was that they told new stories rather than recomposing old ones. Their characters were singular; each novel had to introduce its readers to a new world. This has not changed.

—John Mullan, How Novels Work

Gottlob Frege’s essay “On Sense and Reference,” published in 1892, stands at the beginning of modern philosophical interest in fictionality—that is, in the truth status of fictional propositions. Poetry—roughly, what we now call literature—had of course long been seen as a special kind of deceit that, at least for poetry’s many defenders, led mysteriously back to the truth. “The truest poetry is the most feigning,” says Shakespeare’s Touchstone; “The novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth,” writes Carlos Fuentes much more recently; and indeed, the literary ground since the Greeks is strewn with chestnuts such as these.¹ “The history of Western literary theory,” as one noted theorist puts it, “can be summed up as a continuous debate on the classical dictum that poets are liars.”² Frege’s interest was nonetheless distinct, for he was interested in semantic questions regarding language’s capacity to refer to the world; literary language was a curious subspecies that did not, he argued, refer at all. If we read, in Homer, that “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while he was sound asleep,” we understand the proposition as having a sense even though the proper name Odysseus has no reference in the real world, and thus no truth-value. “In hearing an epic poem … apart from the euphony of language we are interested only in the sense of sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused…. Hence it is a matter of no concern to us whether the name ‘Odysseus,’ for instance, has a reference, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art.”³

“A matter of no concern to us,” perhaps, but would the ancient Greeks have felt the same way? To be fair, Frege’s essay is only tangentially concerned with literary reference; it focuses on the way signs in general refer, and Frege, like many early theorists, felt that sharply separating out literature from “natural” forms of discourse clarified the issues.⁴ It is therefore not surprising that, as a theory of fiction, Frege’s treatment of Homer leaves much to be desired. But one of its shortcomings in particular is shared by more modern and elaborate theories of fiction. That shortcoming is historical. We are welcome to our doubts about Odysseus’s reality, or for that matter about Athena’s—as were, presumably, the Greeks—but Homer certainly didn’t “invent” them in the manner that Balzac invented Old Goriot or Dickens invented Little Dorrit. Epic heroes and the gods were quite simply attested: they were authorized by tradition. They may or may not have had reference in Frege’s empirical sense, but they didn’t need any: they possessed a type of extratextual existence that the protagonists of the typical nineteenth-century novel did not.⁵ Which is to say that along with asking what fiction “is,” we might also ask if fiction always is, in the same way: mightn’t calling Odysseus fictional be to mischaracterize Greek practices of poetic invention, and to read the Odyssey as if it were a modern novel?

We might offer sympathetic support for Frege’s contention that literary protagonists have no reference by limiting it to the nineteenth-century novel—a likely source of the philosopher’s conviction in the first place. The difficulty, however, is that substituting a sentence from Balzac or Dickens for Homer’s verses leads to new complications: Old Goriot or Little Dorrit may have no reference, but their inventors refer rather insistently to the Paris and London of their day—not only to places, but also to the workings of money and class and institutions. Such reference obviously falls outside Frege’s understanding of the term, predicated as it is on the proper name. We could, then, refine Frege’s proposal, perhaps noting with John Searle and others that certain fictional genres contain “nonfictional commitments,” which is to say, references to known people and places.⁶ This type of accommodation does not, however, solve the problem, which I repeat is at bottom historical: unlike ancient epic, the nineteenth-century novel speaks about specific, local, empirical phenomena, but it does so using completely nonexistent characters engaged in actions that never happened. Homer, meanwhile, spoke of legendary people and events, both (we may speculate) because of their intrinsic interest (heroes, by definition, are worthy of being known) and for the moral or ethical lessons they taught (heroes, by definition, are exemplary). Not without reason are we used to thinking of Western literary history along the lines laid out by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: literature becomes more and more real, more focused on physical reality. But Frege’s remark, by its very inadequacy, reminds us that we must also factor in the converse: modern literature at its most splendidly realist is also removed from reality in a way it had never been before. It can talk a lot about history, implicitly or explicitly, but it does not claim to treat the same people and events that historians do. The difference between Homer and the modern novelist is thus not one of degree: the way the texts work, their modes of reference, are simply incommensurable. And if we agree to call the mode of Balzac and Dickens fiction, then Homer did not write fiction.

The Odyssey is not fiction? Not a novel, granted—even the many scholars who remain divided about the novel’s origin can probably agree on that much. But surely fiction and literature as such are coextensive: “All literatures, including the literature of Greece, have always designated themselves as existing in the mode of fiction,” writes Paul de Man.⁷ Indeed, “fiction” is the innocuous term used when generic objections are feared or when genre is uncertain: The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene may or may not be novels, but they are surely fiction. In fact, “fiction” is the most unobjectionable term of all, better even than “literature,” a word (and therefore, troublingly, maybe even a concept) that has come into use very recently.⁸ Of course, like “literature,” “fiction” has a lexographic history. It derives from the Latin fingere, to invent; it was long used as a synonym for lies, and sometimes for poetry, especially types of poetry that did not aspire to the dignity of epic or tragedy; around the nineteenth century it became synonymous with the novel and, as I’ve noted, with narrative literature more generally.⁹ Yet my point is not ultimately lexographic: as a handful of scholars working on the early English novel have suggested, it is the operations we associate with fiction that are historically bounded.¹⁰

Broad uses of the word fiction can of course have their own logic and utility. In many ways, humans are uniquely fiction-making animals, as Kendall Walton for one has shown, and it may be that this cognitive ability is an evolutionary adaptation.¹¹ Moreover, there is certainly nothing inherently wrong-headed about using “fiction” as an umbrella designation for discourses about poetry.¹² Still, a clue that all literatures have perhaps not always operated in the fictional mode can be found in one of de Man’s favorite authors: Rousseau famously refused to identify himself as the author of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a text he presented as authentic correspondence even as he called that authenticity into doubt. Clearly, it would be inaccurate to say, with Frege, that “it is of no concern” to him or his readers whether his heroine Julie existed. It must be of concern; otherwise he would not have gone to the trouble of addressing the issue in not one but two prefaces. Few if any were duped by Rousseau’s posture; it was unconvincing by design, as I will show. The point for now is simply that Rousseau—like many other novelists of his age—did not relinquish the Fregian “reference” of the proper name. And so Julie may not really be fiction any more than the Odyssey—at least not in the sense of Balzac or Dickens, who were, true to Frege’s intuition, unconcerned with the literal reference of their protagonists’ proper names. Or rather, less even than unconcerned, if by this we mean, “Maybe Goriot existed, maybe he didn’t.” Goriot did not exist—no hedging necessary.

This Introduction begins with some examples of how people have spoken, quite diversely, of the relation between poetry (or literature) and history (which itself is an unstable term). In these sections, Aristotle, Richardson, and a few nineteenth-century writers help flesh out some preliminary characteristics of what I will be calling the three “regimes” of poetic invention—the Aristotelian regime, the pseudofactual regime, and the fictional regime. Of special concern will be explaining what we lose if—following previous critics who have tried to replace the history of the novel with a history of fiction—we consider the pseudofactual novel to be merely an early version of the fictional novel: what came “before fiction,” as my title implies, was not fiction. (It was not inadequate, clunky, or naïve for not being fiction; it simply consisted of practices and rationales that fiction replaces or at least supplements with others.) I will finish up with some methodological remarks designed both to clarify what I mean by the term regime and to underline how the type of literary history it subtends departs from most accounts of the novel’s rise. This all amounts, I hope, to a preliminary case for the pragmatic usefulness of a historically restricted definition of fiction; given space limitations, it cannot be a full presentation and defense of modern fiction’s “legitimacy” (to borrow a term from Hans Blumenberg).¹³ Readers are asked to keep in mind that my analyses of the six writers treated in the chapters that follow will help fill in many of the blanks in this initial sketch; the Conclusion too chases down some problems it would be premature to tackle at this point. If, as I sometimes fear, Before Fiction opens up more questions than it answers, I can only hope that they are at least not the same questions.

Aristotle, Poetry, History

Homer, Rousseau, Balzac: one might grant differences in the way these authors invent without going so far as to deny some of them fictional credentials entirely. Why arbitrarily brand a given cultural practice as fiction proper, excommunicating writers who don’t measure up to the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel? Why not speak, rather, of different types of fictional modes? This would allow us to say that Homer operates in one mode, Rousseau in another, and Dickens in another still, while all the while not denying that their works have something in common. After all, fiction comes from fingere, as I’ve pointed out myself, and all these writers, readers know, are making or inventing to one degree or another. Surely we can agree that Homer, Rousseau, and Dickens did not write, did not want us to think that they were writing, history. Besides, Aristotle long ago carved out for poetry the domain of the possible, and opposed it to history. Why not call the underlying something that unites their texts—that is, the quality that separates them from historical assertions—“fiction”?

Let’s start with Aristotle, then, whose separation of poetry and history has indeed become proverbial, the place we go for an authoritative formulation of what we already know. The famous lines run as follows: “The difference between the historian and the poet is not merely that one writes verse and the other prose—one could turn Herodotus’ work into verse and it would be just as much history as before; the essential difference is that the one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen.”¹⁴ The philosopher’s words jibe nicely with modern ideas about verisimilitude, realism, and probability on the one hand, and invention on the other: realistic works don’t pretend to be history, they create something of a parallel world that behaves like the world of history. Thus modern commentators often see Aristotle’s “would happen” as endorsing the idea that literature creates alternate, probable, or hypothetical worlds. “It is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened,” writes one critic of the modern novel: “Internal consistency and plausibility become more important than referential rectitude.”¹⁵ Little Dorrit, we might say, describes what might happen to an imagined debtor imprisoned in Marshalsea, not what the prison’s real inmates did and experienced. A reader could always judge Dickens’s novel unconvincing (too many coincidences, too much melodrama), but that would just make it unsuccessful fiction, not, obviously, history. Clearly, the “would happen” of poetry covers Dickens’s practice quite nicely; therefore the house of fiction may have many rooms, but it’s still fiction through and through.

And there are more ways still to argue that Aristotle’s theory of poetry makes way for Little Dorrit. Elaborating on the distinction between what happened and what would happen, the philosopher continues:

That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history, since poetry tends to make general statements, while those of history are particular. A “general statement” means one that tells us what sort of man would, probably or necessarily, say or do what sort of thing, and this is what poetry aims at, though it attaches proper names; a particular statement on the other hand tells us what Alcibiades, for instance, did or what happened to him.

This passage too can underwrite an extension of the Poetics to the modern novel. First, the novel’s nonhistorical characters can be said to embody social types, human values and experiences, lessons about this or that; it is thus general. Stephen Halliwell has warned, I think rightly, that there is little to no evidence for this understanding of Aristotle’s generality, however, and so he proposes a second, less anachronistic resemblance between poetic generality and modern fiction.¹⁶ After all, we routinely speak of successful fiction as creating a thick, internally coherent world, and a small modification of the translation can reinforce this: replacing “would happen” with “might happen” or “could happen” aligns poetry still more closely with “hypothetical” or “imaginable realities.”¹⁷ Halliwell’s case for the relevance of ancient theories of mimesis to enduring problems of representation therefore includes the suggestion that the author of the Poetics “is feeling his way … toward a notion of the fictional or the fictive.”¹⁸ History is what happens, poetry is what might happen, what can be imagined as happening. Historians are given their material, poets invent it. And so do novelists, we now add.

For at least two reasons, however, Aristotle is less firm than we are in this happy division of labor. First, as Halliwell himself notes, generality—what “would happen”—is much more plausibly understood as a structural feature of poetry, related to plotting, causality, motives and so on. Aristotle, who disliked nothing so much as episodic plots, defines it himself as “what can happen in a strictly probable or necessary sequence.” Second, generality for Aristotle can hardly mean that the poet “imagines” or “invents” people and events that could “realistically” have existed or happened, for the simple reason that Greek poets, while inventing motives and causes, do not usually invent their heroes. Instead, they use proper names referring to the very same people historians do. Poetry is general, writes Aristotle, and he explains that this involves probability and necessity—plotting. But he cannot keep from adding, “though it attaches proper names”—the “though” registering an obstacle to a clean opposition between poetry and history. This does not destroy the criterion of poetic generality, certainly, for we can take our interpretive cue from subsequent commentators and practitioners (say, those of the French neoclassical stage) and understand the philosopher’s words like this: the historian cannot choose among things that happened to Alcibiades, whereas the poet selects certain things and invents other things said or done, in view of constructing a unified plot. But Aristotle’s “though” does complicate our assimilation of that generality to the modern idea of a fictional world: the world of poetry is causally coherent, but it is not invented in quite the same way as is a novel by Dickens, whose protagonists were not Gladstone or Disraeli.

The passage moreover does not stop here, as if Aristotle himself were not quite convinced that he had explained why poetry was “general.” That this remains a problem is made clear by Aristotle’s swerve away from tragedy to a species of poetry that is more obviously both supportive of claims to generality and distinct from history. “That poetry does aim at generality has long been obvious in the case of comedy, where the poets make up the plot from a series of probable happenings and then give the persons any names they like, instead of writing about particular people as the lampooners did.” The logic here is not spelled out, but presumably we are to infer that comic playwrights—as distinct from the satiric playwrights (“lampooners,” or more literally, “iambic poets”) of what we now call “Old Comedy”—invent and name protagonists who embody given human character types, who are therefore walking generalities. (Aristotle itemized various character types in his Ethics, and his descriptions would be greatly elaborated by his student Theophrastus.) Comedy, then, makes for a cleaner opposition between poetry and history. Yet for a second time Aristotle is drawn back to the fact that tragedy doesn’t function this way at all: “In tragedy, however, they stick to the actual names.” At this point, Aristotle finally drops the idea of poetry as a general statement and advances an argument that was enthusiastically developed by his Renaissance followers: “conviction” is instilled in viewers by real events, hence the importance of real protagonists.

The contortions of this famous passage are good evidence of Aristotle’s efforts to square his initial hypothesis on poetry’s interest in what “would happen” with the irrepressible fact that tragedy uses proper names. These proper names, which keep popping back up each time the philosopher seems to have the lid on the box, effectively resist the bringing of all poetry, as distinct from history, under the banner of generality. In other words, comedy and tragedy are not general in quite the same way, just as the distinction between the comic poet and the historian is not exactly the distinction obtaining between the tragic poet and the historian. By Aristotle’s own reckoning, tragedy and comedy function differently. It is not merely that one depicts people better than they are and the other worse (as he writes elsewhere in the Poetics), nor only that one speaks of distinguished families and lofty sentiments, while the other busies itself with the low born and their mundane concerns (as later commentators would repeat). Rather, tragedy deals with real people and comedy with types.

This, at any rate, was what later European commentators would take from Aristotle, and it proved surprisingly adequate to poetic practice for about 2000 years: comic characters were invented; serious protagonists were taken from history. Thus Diderot, toeing the Aristotelian line in 1758, could still divide discourse into three types: “History, where facts are given; tragedy, where the poet adds to history what he thinks likely to increase its interest; comedy, where the poet invents everything.”¹⁹ Of course, Diderot leaves out other possibilities, notably fable. And one can easily come up with examples that sit uncomfortably or not at all with the preference for attested subject matter. Aristotle himself backs up after declaring that tragic poets “stick to the actual names” and gives a dutiful nod to Agathon’s now lost tragedy Antheus, which did feature invented characters. (Antheus leads the author of the Poetics to shrug off his hypothesis that the reality of characters imparts necessary conviction, since he freely admits that invention doesn’t in the end infringe on the audience’s pleasure.) But Antheus is to all appearances a one-off, for nowhere in the classical corpus do we find references to other such tragedies. To be sure, the Greek novels of Achilles Tatius, Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others, recount the adventures of characters who have no sanction outside the text, as do the works of Petronius and Apuleius that Mikhail Bakhtin pointed to as antecedents of the modern novel.²⁰ By the same token, however, these works were long denigrated precisely because, like “mere” fables, they lacked the prestige of history. Any number of famed Renaissance works, from More’s Utopia (1516) and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516–32) to Rabelais’s chronicles (1532–52) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–96), are hardly Aristotelian, and indeed flaunt what we can no doubt broadly call their fictionality. Yet on inspection the invention practiced by these writers bears little relation to the fictionality of a character like Balzac’s Goriot: such works are parodically inseparable from either attested heroes of the chivalric past (Ariosto, Spenser), or the truth claims of the New World travel narrative or medieval chronicle (More, Rabelais).²¹ Rather than being fictional, they parody what someone else is purported to regard as true.

It is not to impugn the creativity of pre-nineteenth-century writers that I resist speaking of literature as a house of fiction with many, many rooms. Nor does taking fictionality for something other than a universal property of literature imply that invented heroes were, in Foucauldian parlance, “unthinkable” for the Greeks, Romans, or Europeans of the Renaissance. In different ways, all the writers I have just mentioned invent characters from scratch, and an alternate version of the present study could no doubt inventory at length such practices. But our modern indifference to what Frege called characters’ “reference” keeps us from making the simple empirical observation that underwrites Before Fiction. For much of Western literary history, the principal traffic of literature was in heroes readers had already heard about.

Historical Faith

Curiously—at least at first glance—reference was never more doggedly asserted than just before its nineteenth-century eclipse: for about a hundred years now, literary historians have been drawing attention to the fact that early novelists insisted on the literal truth of their works.²² And literary historians have also noted, with understandable puzzlement, that few if any contemporaries, readers or writers, seem to have believed in this truth. The situation made for some oddly contorted speculations, like this one, occurring in a famous letter by Richardson to William Warburton. In the middle of Clarissa’s serial publication, in 1748, Richardson regrets that Warburton’s preface for the third volume explicitly referred to Richardson as the author of the letters, not their editor:

Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho’ I want not the letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho’ we know it to be Fiction.²³

A rapid interpretation of Richardson’s remark would hold that the novelist is reflecting on the very nature of the reading experience; when we read we enter the fictional world by accepting it provisionally as true even though we know otherwise. The letter would be, then, one more reason to believe that fiction always has been fiction. Yet the passage is historically marked, and its propositions are less compatible than they first appear with modern habits. After all, Richardson’s desired posture is very close to the one Rousseau will devise and execute for Julie: the letters should be presented as genuine, but without intent to deceive (there is properly speaking no hoax). But what might that mean? And why bother, if the nature of the reading experience is (as everyone knows) the provisional or temporary acceptance of what we do not really believe?

Richardson gives two reasons for maintaining an “Air of Genuineness,” the first of which the modern reader may skip right over in a rush to get to the seemingly more recognizable contention that we read fiction quite simply as if it were history. For that first reason is a bit unfamiliar: admitting the exemplary characters as mere fabrications, Richardson holds, will undercut the moral aspirations of the book. The remoteness of Richardson’s logic stems from two sources: on the one hand, (“high”) literature since Richardson’s time has largely divested itself of overt moralizing (it may investigate moral dilemmas, but it shouldn’t propose exemplary heroes); on the other, even in the (typically “lower”) forms that do propose models of behavior (most obviously, children’s literature), it may now be hard to see why a character’s nonexistence would disable exemplarity. On the contrary, perhaps it is more common now to assume that invented characters make better role models, since reality, to strike a Lukácsian note, is no place for heroes. Historically, however, this position stands out, because moral exemplarity had always been underwritten by the reality of the exemplars: history itself was our moral compass, and so exemplars were never simply made up, they had to have existed. (Again, we would do better to think of that existence not so much as “empirical” or “documented” as simply attested: exemplary heroes exist in the realm of common knowledge or fame in the Latin sense of “renown,” fama.) Richardson’s worry, then, does make sense within older frameworks for understanding character, recalling for example Aristotle’s argument that real characters make for greater conviction.

The unfamiliarity of Richardson’s first remark on moral exemplarity is, moreover, a good reason not to regard his second argument for genuineness as self-evident. The trap, I believe, is that we are accustomed to thinking of fiction as an “as if” proposition. And so the novelist here appears to anticipate nicely the formula of Coleridge’s that so many now reach for when thought turns to the kind of credence literature demands. Fiction—and Richardson himself uses the word—involves a “willing suspension of disbelief.”²⁴ Yet on inspection, we see that the novelist thinks that the conservation of genuineness increases the “as if” illusion; the more genuineness, then, the more “historical faith.” This leaves us some distance from the idea that fiction can be considered as hypothetical, or that it is a sort of make-believe into which one enters with Coleridgian willingness. Nor is his illusion like one of those drawings that can be either a duck or a rabbit but not both at once. And it resembles still less an alternate or possible world. Instead, illusion for Richardson knows greater or lesser degrees; keeping up the pretense of truth simply increases it.

If it goes against a quick intuitive reading of the letter, the above interpretation does at least have the advantage of complete congruence with the assumption of so much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory: the more you take the spectacle for reality, the greater its effect on you. Burke, in a notorious passage of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), claims that no matter how good the show, people will always leave a play for a public execution next door.²⁵ Contemporary attitudes toward capital punishment aside, the comment speaks volumes about how thinkers of the time rationalized the effect of the artwork.²⁶ The artwork is not fictional in the sense that it is an alternate or hypothetical reality; it is rather a substitute for reality, a simulation that is, unfortunately but necessarily, always a bit off. This explains, then, why Richardson would say that he wished Warburton’s preface hadn’t given the game away, even though he had no intent to fool people: his readers would have believed him more than they now do. “The nearer [the spectacle] approaches the reality,” writes Burke, “the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power.”²⁷ Never perfect, but more perfect—this indeed is the gist of Richardson’s apparently paradoxical wish. And Burke’s words also remind us that when Richardson says fiction, his use of the term does not substantially diverge from its common meaning—a lie.²⁸ With the proper presentation, we almost believe lies are true. Now the fact that Clarissa was on its way to being a huge success despite Warburton’s indiscretion might of course have led Richardson to conclude that illusion—or this type of illusion, anyway—had nothing to do with the power of his book; but when summoned to express how he thought his novel worked, he took the path traveled by most of the period’s thinkers: he indexed it to a literal reality.

Fiction’s Reality, Realist Fiction

Richardson’s comments on Clarissa are representative of a mode of reference I will be calling, with Barbara Foley, the pseudofactual: novelists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely assert—though ambiguously, half-heartedly, or ironically—the literal reality of their books. Understanding the amplitude of the phenomenon will require more coordinates than just this one letter, and I will give some shortly. Let’s look first, however, at a mode of reference that is startlingly different and much more familiar—the reference that Frege says is not reference at all, and that occurs when it does not matter to readers whether a writer’s characters ever existed.

Following the dramatic rout of the French army, Europe’s largest, in the Franco-Prussian war, a British officer named George Tomkyns Chesney feared for his country’s own military preparation. And so he published, in Blackwood’s Magazine of May 1871, a novella entitled “The Battle of Dorking,” in which he recounted an imaginary invasion of Britain, some time in the future, by an unnamed (though German-speaking) aggressor. The story was republished many times, and its hold on the British imagination was considerable. “So powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever in panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such day of humiliation for England is at least possible.”²⁹ Thus wrote one critic, and the thought of the possibility of an invasion was enough to accomplish what Chesney wanted, which was to beef up British military peacetime maneuvers. (Inadvertently, Chesney also became the father of a novelistic subgenre, that of invasion fiction.)

Chesney’s text, the critic’s words, and even the real-world political effects of the tale are from one point of view perfectly unremarkable: novels (and by extension films) can exercise a hold over readers’ imaginations and be effective propaganda. Yet from another point of view—Richardson’s—this episode would seem remarkable indeed, as we can readily see if we try to apply his standard of “historical faith.” Chesney didn’t pretend that his story was real, obviously; and how could contemporary readers read it “as” true, in Richardson’s sense of historical truthfulness, since it was clearly set in the future? Note the vocabulary of the critic quoted above: “The Battle of Dorking” produces an intense impression of reality, and that impression of reality persuades the reader that what is recounted is possible. No faith is necessary, and the effect of the novel does not vary in proportion to the reader’s belief in its literal reality. This type of “as if” can work its uncanny magic on the “coolest disbeliever.” Chesney’s novella in essence advances a proposition about reality via the construction of a particularly vivid world—a vividness that is generated by internal means (presumably character, plot, and detail) and not through the manipulation of a frame (there are no real letters, no discovered manuscripts).

Any reader of Balzac is familiar with his insistence on his novels’ engagement with reality. “All is true,” he writes at the opening of Le Père Goriot (1835), with the bold assertion standing out all the more because Balzac, borrowing from Shakespeare, makes it in English.³⁰ And one can hardly miss his aspiration to be the historian of his time—“to write the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners.”³¹ Truth, history: little seems to have changed since Richardson. No wonder the pseudofactual novel can be easily cast, as we will see many doing, as a forerunner of later realist works: it points away from the ideal and to the real, and by the nineteenth century the victory of the real will be complete. If the terms all come from a common pool, however, there has plainly been a revolution in what they designate. For example, Richardson refrained from asserting truth—“I want not the letters to be thought genuine”—whereas Balzac actually goes ahead and asserts it. If truth meant the same thing in both cases, we would have to conclude that Balzac represents something of a regression, and that we have slipped from a time when writers didn’t want to pull a fast one to one when they did. But this is obviously not the correct conclusion. Balzac asserts truthfulness where Richardson cannot because his claim is in fact not hard (i.e., literal) but soft: “I am about to tell you how the world really is, as opposed to something that really happened.” For Richardson, by contrast, reading with “historical faith” means pretending that the novel’s collection of people, actions, and events are in fact a subset of the larger collection of such discrete facts that make up history; to the extent that Clarissa talks about “the way things are,” it does so because we are to pretend that it is one of those things. With Balzac, belonging to the world of Scott and Hegel, history is no longer an aggregate of facts, but something like a system underlying the epiphenomenal particulars of a given age. Because its real subject is less individuals than the society that explains individuals, to write history is to seek “the hidden meaning of this huge assembly of figures, passions, and events.”³² And this helps explain, at least in part, why writers of the fictional regime show no compunction about inventing their characters. Old Goriot is just as good as any real human being, for the novel’s human inhabitants, real or invented, are only the observable surface of the novel’s deeper subject. Frege was right to say that it (now) makes no difference whether literary characters exist, but wrong to suggest that this was because (modern) literature did not refer. The novel does, of course, refer—not to real people, but to abstractions we call “the world,” “society,” or “reality.”

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, it became axiomatic that realism claimed to be true.

For eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers as for their readers, realism in literature (even if the word is not always used) is an ideal: the ideal of the faithful representation of the real, the ideal of truthful discourse …; all literary revolutions at the time were fought in the name of representation that would be still more faithful to “life.”

These lines come from Tzvetan Todorov’s introduction to Littérature et réalité (1982), a collection of previously published essays bent on showing that realism is in fact deeply mendacious in its claims to transparency and immediacy.³³ One of these was Roland Barthes’s 1968 article “L’Effet de réel,” probably the most succinct and resonant articulation of a thesis prominent in much of the critic’s work: realism pretends to be a transparent window onto the world, and this pretension is bad politics and, more fundamentally, bad semiotics. Realism, writes Barthes, is underwritten by a mystified conception of the sign; instead of consisting of an arbitrary relation between a signifier and a signified, the realist sign is yoked directly and “naturally” to a referent. Realist language hides the fact that language is connotation or signification behind a simple denotation or naming—“the pure meeting of an object and its expression.” And the epitome of the realist sign is the insignificant detail; material objects that have no narrative or symbolic function are present in the realist text only to better declare “We are the real.” In other words, the realist sign connotes as much as any other sign, but its connotation is that the text is denotation, that signs have referents, that language is—Barthes puts the suspicious word, the last of his essay, in quotes—a “‘representation.’”³⁴

Barthes’s argument is susceptible to different interpretations, of which some are clearly further from the author’s meaning than others. If the “reality effect” has slipped into common academic parlance, this must be at least partially because the phrase itself doesn’t necessarily upset the commonsensical idea that realism was, well, realistic. According to this view, gratuitous details make texts seem real in the sense that they allow for the reader’s visualization, or make the fictional world thicker, thus facilitating the proverbial suspension of disbelief.³⁵ Barthes’s interest, however, is more semiotic, and his claims lie elsewhere. First, he suggests that the gratuitous detail does indeed still signify—it signifies “realism” as such, and is thus part of the realist code. This is innocuous enough: there cannot be much quibble with the proposition that genres have specific contracts, and that the intrusive presence of description announces realism just as, say, the in medias res expositional conversation announces neoclassical tragedy. Barthes’s main point, however, is something else entirely—that realism was built on an illusion, “the referential illusion.”³⁶ The detail did not content itself with announcing the genre of the text, it furthermore attempted to pass itself off as reality itself; that is, not only did it signify “realism,” it signified that it didn’t signify, that language was pure copying.

This enormously influential essay—it can be said to have underwritten a slew of “debunkings” of realist pretense—has also been the object of not a few critiques. One called into doubt Barthes’s reading of Saussurean linguistics by pointing out that Saussure never claimed that the fact that languages were differential systems, or that the link between sounds and concepts was arbitrary, meant that language could not refer to things.³⁷ Besides, if reference were impossible, the whole argument would undermine itself by its very articulation.³⁸ But the oddest thing about Barthes’s viewpoint was that it seemed to imply what for understandable reasons the critic could not state explicitly. Christopher Prendergast has put the difficulty as follows:

The implication of “Nous sommes le réel” [We are the real] is that the words of the text try to perform a kind of disappearing act upon themselves; the text plays a trick whereby the reader undergoes the “illusion” of being confronted not with language, but with reality itself; the sign effaces itself before its “referent” in order to create an “effect”: the illusion of the presence of the object itself.³⁹

The slippage, it would seem, occurs in the double sense of “illusion”: when in his (mis)understanding of Saussurean linguistics Barthes speaks of the referential illusion, he means “fallacy”; but he then begins to behave as though what was at issue, on the part of bad readers, was a properly visual illusion, a bona fide hallucination.⁴⁰ Not without reason does Antoine Compagnon assimilate the denotative directness of the reality effect and the leitmotif of Barthes’s later essay on photography, La Chambre claire: “This has been,” says the photograph, echoing the sirenic “We are the real” of realist objects.⁴¹ Indeed, Compagnon lines up examples from Barthes’s oeuvre that to all appearances suggest that the theorist modeled his critique of reference on the dispelling of an actual sensory illusion. Barthes was particularly fond of an anecdote from Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare, recounting an early nineteenth-century performance of Othello in Baltimore; a white soldier in the audience, enraged to see a black man lay his hands on a white woman, pulls his gun and shoots the actor. Only a literature that sought, in Barthes’s words, to “empty the sign and to distance infinitely its object,” could save us from this fate.⁴²

Barthes’s attack on realism and its “totalitarian ideology of the referent” was no doubt unusual in its slippage from a figurative illusion to a literal one.⁴³ Todorov’s apparently more moderate contentions were in fact the routine ones: realism pretends to be “truthful discourse,” “a faithful representation of the real.” But even this realism would seem to be made of straw. Here is a realist statement of principles, from the programmatic seventeenth chapter of Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859): “I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.”⁴⁴ “Faithful”: Eliot uses Todorov’s word. “Men and things” sounds a lot like “the real.” The novelist even uses the mirror analogy that inevitably arises when conversation turns toward critiquing art’s “copying” function. It’s as if Eliot’s sentence were a concentrate of realism’s bogus promises. Read sympathetically, however, it also restores some balance to the realist claim. It should be obvious, first, that Eliot’s “faithful account” has nothing to do with, say, the “true history” of Oronooko, the royal slave of Surinam, that Behn circulated a century and a half earlier.⁴⁵ One might point out as well that the mirroring function of fiction suggests neither literal truth nor that the novel is a replica of the material world: “in my mind” clearly entails a transformation, and the mirror metaphor, which was a venerable one, did not typically imply anything like copying.⁴⁶ A more easily overlooked part of the sentence is simply “men and things,” with its deliberate generality: how can realism be a copy if its object is not actually specific? And Eliot might have written “things and men” without changing too much her meaning: it is well known that like so many realists by this time, she was beating away at divisions between “high” and “low” that had long structured thought about the arts, so that a lowly still life could become indistinguishable from elevated history painting. Doing away with that distinction does not mean only that the lives of carpenters are as worthy of attention as the exploits of generals and statesmen. It also means that, as with Balzac, known human beings are no longer the subject of art. Rather, the world—humans and things, humans as things, sometimes just things staring back at the anonymous procession of human life—is represented.

“A faithful account of men and things,” writes Eliot; Balzac speaks in his preface to the Comédie humaine of “copying all of society.”⁴⁷ It’s really the object of the account or of the copying here that hides—but hides in plain sight—the complexity, the counterintuitiveness, of the realist operation, and its difference with respect to earlier novels’ assertions of truth. (Those earlier assertions were complex as well, as we will see; but they were complex in their own manner.) Todorov insinuates the crude literalism of declarations like these, but—and this is particularly obvious after a consideration of Richardson’s posture—there is no literalism: one cannot literally copy abstractions like “men” and “society.” No wonder Balzac, Eliot, and others spent so much time thinking about how their novels, full of people who never existed and whose existence was never even asserted, were faithful copies: they weren’t stating something that everyone knew but rather something that, having no precedent, needed to be argued before readers. That something was fiction.

Fiction, then, was real and not real. By this point it should be clear that I do not mean this as a more or less timeless paradox (Fuentes’s “The novel [is] a lie that is the foundation of truth”), nor as a formulation of the mitigated credence (“suspended disbelief”) that is frequently assumed to underwrite the literary reading experience—all such experience. Rather, fiction—as opposed to both Aristotle’s poetry and the pseudofactual period of the novel’s history—is not literally real, for it didn’t happen, but it is somehow like reality. This is not a matter of content. Though I have used realist authors to illustrate fiction, and though literary realism is certainly fictional, fiction is also more than realism: it need not concern itself with class relations, milieu, money, poverty, the everyday, and other common attributes of the realist novel. Nor does fiction need to be “realistic” in the sense of historically or scientifically possible, which is in part why I mentioned the example of Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking”; ghosts, time travel, and counterfactual history are no more or no less fictional than the sober and documented realist novel.

What makes fiction fiction (and what makes the realist novel fiction) is not content but the oblique manner in which it makes propositions about the world.⁴⁸ Unlike the pseudofactual mode, which asserts literal truth so as to lay claim to other sorts of truth (moral, emotional, and so on), it operates analogically or hypothetically. Hypothetically: the vivid world postulated by Chesney’s novella is taken as a comment on the world that we share. “Dear Reader!” writes Dickens at the end of Hard Times (1854), “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.”⁴⁹ Analogically: the writer of fiction says, in essence, “This sort of thing is always happening,” “This book is like the world.” Readers are free to remain skeptical, but their skepticism will not be voiced as a denunciation of the literal truth of the story, nor even as a denunciation of the novel’s inability to make claims on reality because it is not factually true. One attacks, rather, the analysis the book makes of the world. So when Lamartine criticized Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), he wrote, quite simply, “The world is not like that.”⁵⁰ Fiction whose propositional value you reject becomes a fairy tale—imaginings that may well be internally consistent and vivid, but whose analogical power, whose claim on reality, is nil.

Reality Before Realism, or, the Pseudofactual

Fiction, then, was subtly paradoxical, advancing propositions about the world—and about very specific parts of that world—via the destinies of invented characters. “[My book] won’t be imaginary facts, it will be what happens everywhere” (Balzac); “My method is to depict true things with invented characters” (Hugo): it is hard to see in such abundant reformulations the desire to get readers “to believe without reservation in the reality of the fictive worlds [writers] created,” or an attempt to “encourage a benumbed and credulous form of reading that accepts at face value the most banal tricks of the referential illusion.”⁵¹ Nineteenth-century writers pushed the paradox to the fore, as if trying to think it through; scholars of realism have largely ignored it. In good part this is due to the “straw man” attacks on realist naïveté I have mentioned: imagining that realism was an attempt at illusion is good for bolstering our sense of our own sophistication. Yet what is notable about realist novels, from another point of view, is precisely their “-ist”: they do not pretend to be literally true. If we are looking for hyperbolically literal claims to truth, the place to go is not the nineteenth century, but the eighteenth or before. It is there we find the model of art-as-illusion; it is there theorists approvingly repeat anecdotes like that of the Baltimore soldier, which far from being representative of realism—pace Barthes—was making a very belated apparition in Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare; and it is there writers assert time and again the literal truth of their works, works that typically take the form of documents—letters, memoirs, and other purportedly discovered manuscripts.

Examples of the pseudofactual posture will occur to anyone familiar with the canonical works of Defoe or Marivaux or Graffigny, Walpole or Mackenzie or Laclos. But beyond such general impressions, what do we really know about this strange phenomenon? In one sense, a good deal—though our knowledge has been shaped and limited by an inability to separate the history of the novel from the history of realism. Assertions of literal truth, many have long argued, are part and parcel of the novel’s turn toward reality, a turn that was accomplished in the nineteenth century. The English and French pseudofactual novel was “a peculiar phase of the theory of realism,” declared the title of the 1913 article by Arthur Jerrold Tieje that may be the first modern scholarly examination of the subject. Knowingly or not, most have followed Tieje’s lead, producing a narrative that (for France at least) goes like this. In the 1660s, readers began to reject the marvelous but improbable deeds associated with the long French romans héroïques; plots and settings that matched everyday experience became the rage. As a result, the deliberately remote historical settings of the romance were replaced by the historical novella, or nouvelle historique, which made use of more recent, documented history (Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves [1678] is the celebrated example). Numerous other novellas were said to be true stories, recently transpired; their geography was that of French cities, and characters started sporting French names. Subsequently, the faux memoir established itself as the form that bridged history and the novel; as it faltered in the mid-eighteenth century, the epistolary novel, better able to “write to the moment” as the ascendant reign of sensibilité demanded, came into its own and dominated production until into the nineteenth century, when interest in the workings of history finally displaced interest in the workings of the heart.⁵² (The English novel requires some alteration of the specifics of the narrative, but as we’ll see in a moment, the big picture doesn’t change much.) Hence, in his 1969 study Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir Novel, Philip Stewart sees pseudofactual strategies as part of realism’s rise out of the ashes of improbable romance: “The technique of imitating reality … did not await [nineteenth-century realists]: it had been pieced together by a score of novelists good and bad in the first half of the eighteenth century.”⁵³ In a synthesis of Stewart’s findings and those of others, Dorrit Cohn thus concludes, “Historians of the novel have shown that, as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality.”⁵⁴ By the claiming the literal truthfulness of their texts, writers helped point literature away from the allegorical or the ideal and toward the real; once the ideal had been vanquished, the posture could be abandoned.

The fact that Cohn’s synthesis occurs in a work titled The Distinction of Fiction suggests, however, a slightly different way of understanding this evolution. Realism, after all, is not real but openly fictional. What may be needed, then, is to turn the “more and more real” narrative on its head. This is what Lennard Davis does in his 1983 book Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, which rewrites the history of the novel not as a tightening of the bond with reality but rather as the discovery of fictionality itself. For Davis, the modern novel does not develop by turning away from romance, as many have argued or assumed; rather, the novel becomes the novel by distancing itself from factual forms of discourse. The seventeenth century, he argues, witnessed the birth and expansion of an “undifferentiated matrix” where news reports and novels were essentially indistinguishable forms of discourse. Then, in the eighteenth century, “as the news/novel discourse began to subdivide, and as the culture began making clearer demands for factual or fictional narrative, the old claim that a work was true become harder to substantiate. As that happened, the possibility arose that a work could be purely fictional.”⁵⁵ Whereas most critics had seen a formerly fanciful genre being slowly altered through the invention of new techniques of accurate imitation, Davis casts the process as something of the reverse: the novel starts as true, and then slowly evolves indices of its fictionality. As for when this occurs, Davis argues that the “shift toward the fictional” is detectible in Defoe; the shift has not yet fully occurred in Davis’s two other major figures, Richardson and Fielding, but the implication is that once fiction has been explored by writers of this caliber, others will consolidate the gains.

Davis’s account was quickly followed by Barbara Foley’s Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (1986), which provides, at least on the face of things, a different version of the transformation. By allotting separate chapters to the pseudofactual eighteenth century and the realist nineteenth, Foley builds into the structure of her book an opposition. Indeed, Foley repeatedly stresses a qualitative break between pseudofactuality and the nineteenth-century historical novel, which she also calls “fiction” and “realism”: both forms are marked by their own “representational strateg[ies]” and underwritten by distinct “conceptions of history.”⁵⁶ Yet despite this explicit opposition, Foley too lapses into slow-march-of-realism language that echoes Cohn’s paraphrase. She writes: “as the eighteenth century progressed, readers increasingly tired of tongue-in-cheek authorial disavowals of mimetic [i.e., fictional or novelistic] intent”; “The rise of the mode that we term ‘realism’ clearly involved an initial dependence upon, but an ultimate replacement of, the ‘sense of the real’ [i.e., the claim to literal truth].”⁵⁷ And Foley situates the process where Davis does: “Hesitatingly in the works of Defoe, then more boldly in subsequent novels of the eighteenth century, the pseudofactual imposture signaled the invocation of a mimetic contract.”⁵⁸ The result is that neither Foley nor Davis has much shifted our understanding of literary history. Before, pseudofactual insistence on the novel’s literal reality was the origin of realism; now, pseudofactual irony is seen as the first sign of a concept of the fictional. Defoe, no longer an incipient realist, has been repurposed as an early theorist of fictionality. We are left with a familiar arc, plotted using the same old coordinates; all that has been done has been to rename the endpoint.

The most noted scholar to take up the problem of fiction’s history, Catherine Gallagher, has successfully avoided such gradualism. Unlike Davis or Foley, who both postulate a slow change—“readers increasing tired” and so on—Gallagher works from an implicitly Foucauldian model of rupture: in the middle decades of the eighteenth century there occurred a “massive reorientation of textual referentiality” that replaced the early novel’s direct reference to real people with fiction.⁵⁹ Gallagher develops this idea in two separate accounts. The first, found in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), is particularly noteworthy because it uses coordinates that previous scholars hadn’t: the rupture of modern fictionality is readable not in the usual English suspects—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—but in texts by women authors. Unlike Manley’s “transparently slanderous” New Atalantis (1709), a paradigm for the keyed narratives of the early eighteenth century that refer to real people under the cover of historical or fanciful masks, Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1750) was not read as keyed and “made few serious demands on the public’s credit.”⁶⁰ The invention of fiction, Gallagher suggests, must lie somewhere between the two. Her second account, “The Rise of Fictionality” (2003; English trans. 2006), is chronologically compatible with the narrative of Nobody’s Story, though it reverts to the figures prominent in familiar histories of the English novel. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Gallagher observes, contains a famous passage that explicitly denies that the novel portrays real people; Fielding claims instead to describe types drawn from life. The change from the pseudofactual posture of Robinson Crusoe is obvious, and therefore sometime between 1720 and 1742 “new modes of non-reference arose” and the novel became properly fictional.⁶¹ For Gallagher, fiction does rise, but not quite in the manner of Davis and Foley. Instead, the pretense of truth is simply swept off the stage by fictionality.⁶²

A worry, however, is that in all three accounts the line between fiction and a type of novel that purportedly preceded it grows so maddeningly fuzzy that any real distinction is blotted out. For Foley, not only are the variously ironic pseudofactual stances of the eighteenth-century novel cast as the early stage of fictional realism; in addition, the ironic stance is already detectible in Behn’s novels of the 1680s.⁶³ Mightn’t the pseudofactual always be, from the very beginning, just an early fictionality? Meanwhile, Davis’s wording makes it impossible to determine when the modern opposition between fact and fiction was in place. The culture “began” to make demands of a clear separation, Davis says in the passage I quoted above. Yet how can a culture desire a separation of two things between which it cannot distinguish? How can people want what they can’t yet conceive? And when exactly did they begin to make their demands for something new? At what point did the old truth claims “bec[o]me harder to substantiate”? Does this mean that people once took the claims seriously and then wised up? What exactly is this “possibility … that a work could be purely fictional” that “arose”? Did it arise collectively? In the mind of one author, or a group of vanguard readers? In Nobody’s Story, Gallagher achieves a sharper separation, but mostly because by using the keyed scandalous narratives of the early eighteenth century as a foil for the obviously bogus truth pretense of Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, she avoids confronting the saturating presence of the pseudofactual mode. Certainly, Lennox’s truth-posture makes few serious demands on the public’s credit—but how exactly do her demands differ from the demands of Richardson, Defoe, or even Montesquieu, who prefaces Les Lettres persanes (1721) by saying “The Persians of the following letters stayed with me in my home”?⁶⁴ Moreover, if the pseudofactual form of The Life of Harriot Stuart was just a shell, not to be taken seriously, why wouldn’t any number of earlier faux memoirs—say, Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (1731–1742), or even Villedieu’s pioneering Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1672–1674)—be equally plausible signs that the modern concept of fiction was in the works?⁶⁵ In Gallagher’s view, the referential “somebodies” of the early novel are replaced by fictional “nobodies”; the worry, however, is that it is difficult to tell a nobody from a somebody as long as the pseudofactual form is present. For Davis and Foley, the pseudofactual prepares the way for the fictional; but since on inspection consciousness of the fictional is already incubating within the pseudofactual, the whole distinction falls apart.

Furthermore, the longevity of the pseudofactual posture is odd. As Foley and Davis remark with some surprise, the mock affirmation of truth, which is supposed to be “reced[ing] to subordinate status” in Defoe, is still alive and well much later—later even than Richardson, whom Tieje chose as his terminus.⁶⁶ Foley mentions as late pseudofactual residue titles like Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782). As belated as the latter is, it still allows us to preserve at least the idea that the nineteenth century will mark a clean start. But of course it doesn’t: pseudofactual assertions soldier on long into the nineteenth century. Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) is a true tale, oral at the outset, then relayed back to the author; Constant’s Adolphe (1816) is a memoir replete with bogus provenance; Sand’s Indiana (1832) is a historical anecdote; Hugo, in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829), makes effective use of a heretofore largely unexploited pseudofactual form, the journal, prefacing it with the familiar editorial equivocations. Meanwhile, Shelley presents her Frankenstein (1818) as fact; in America, Poe does the same with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). And still in mid-century England, heedless of dominant third-person omniscience, the Brontë sisters press all manner of pseudofactual frames into service. If in Richardson the truth pretense is, by the reckoning of another critic, “vestigial,” what are we to make of these much later examples?⁶⁷ What permits us to say that readers of certain works read them as fictional, whereas the readers of earlier ones were unequipped with that conceptual category? Villedieu, Lennox, Constant, Poe—to which one did readers cease, for the first time, according serious credit? It’s convenient to think of fiction rising, but a slope that goes on for so long may be closer to a stretch of even ground. Or, for that matter, uneven: in the course of this book we will see that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot take the truth of their novels much more seriously than Crébillon, who writes several decades before them, and that well before them all, Lafayette centers a historical novel around a heroine who never existed: “as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality”: does the record really confirm the reassuringly steady advance of the fictional that Cohn takes, no doubt accurately, from the scholarship?⁶⁸

Such difficulties are enough to cast doubt on the effort to isolate fiction historically. The mock-factual statements issued by pseudofactual novels are after all difficult to distinguish from fictional statements, since no one is intended to believe either. Perhaps novels that make ambivalent assertions of literal truth are really not so different from novels that make no literal claims whatsoever. Maybe they’re just a little more primitive, or maybe, as so many have said for so long, literature by definition has always been self-consciously duplicitous about its own veracity. (In the Odyssey, characters often make truth claims for their narratives precisely at the moment they are about to lie.) On the other hand, maybe it is the approach that creates the impression that the question of fiction’s history is unanswerable or misguided. That approach obliterates the qualitative distinction between the pseudofactual and the fictional in favor of seeing the history of fiction, like that of realism, as a continuum. Just as the novel becomes realist by increasingly emphasizing the material world, it becomes fictional by demanding less and less real credence, until none at all is required and people acknowledge that novels are neither true nor false. For partisans of the rise of realism, Richardson takes one step toward describing bourgeois life, and Balzac another, much bigger one; while if we want to trace the rise of fiction, Richardson’s letter to Warburton is the sign of a dawning realization, an individual and collective coming-to-grips with something that Balzac will grasp with more clarity, and that can be called “the nature of fiction.” Behind this version of events there are some dubious inferences regarding two kinds of relations—between individual and collective practices on the one hand and between practices and their cognitive or conceptual substrate. These are the problems that my account of literary regimes is designed to correct.

Regimes and the History of Forms

Davis, Foley, and Gallagher’s efforts to give fiction a history have a conceptual focus. That is, the way people write novels follows from the way they think; it is because the way they think changes that the novel changes. The schema can be made bi-directional—the novel reflects a change in thought while then furthering and deepening the change—without altering the basic method. Either way, the history of fiction is to be read in a select group of works that document the progress of an underlying conceptual evolution. And this is the way much literary history is done. Individual works are important insofar as they are signs of something else that is otherwise out of sight but nonetheless on the rise—fiction and realism; “the novel,” which is often more of an idea than a thing; a culture of this or that; but really just plain modernity.

A drawing of such an approach to fiction’s history might look like this. A, B, and C are the great authors who over time were coming to see that their works could be fictional; to perceive fiction as legitimate, freed from the alibi of history; to realize at long last that reading and writing involved the coveted “willing suspension of disbelief.” They sighted the conceptual territory of fiction (D) that would soon emerge for all to colonize. D had always been there, pushing up, but aside from these islands, it remained under water. There is, however, a problem. What if nothing below the waterline links these islands to each other or to the mainland in the distance? Sicily lies smack up against the boot of Italy. But despite appearances, it was never part of the boot; geologically speaking, it’s part of North Africa. We see our canonical novels of the past as an archipelago connected to the mainland of now, whereas they may be only a series of data points acting as hosts for our perception of patterns—patterns we perceive based on our knowledge of what is to come.

Do things rise? Of course. Oil painting, or the landscape, or abstract art. In literature, the sonnet and the murder mystery and the naturalist novel. But such things are practices, and tracing the rise of identifiable practices makes a kind of sense that the divination of rising ways of thinking does not. If we redefine fiction as a practice, not as a mode of cognition or an underlying concept detectible beneath the surface of individual works, it too becomes traceable, and its difference with respect to earlier practices—Aristotelian invention and the pseudofactual mode—remains clear. Above, I’ve tried to bring those different practices into focus using a few examples that I believe are representative of the dominant practices of their time. They add up, I believe, to the following narrative.

As is clear from Aristotle and the classical corpus, for a very long time poets—but of course not all poets—took their characters and their main actions from history and wove their plots around what was commonly said to be true. They went about their work this way not because their thinking was hard-wired, but because they and their audience shared a set of assumptions about what literature was good for and how it worked upon us. And so during the first big European heyday of the novel—from the beginning of the seventeenth century until around 1660—writers of French romances who wanted to dignify the genre inspired by the Renaissance rediscovery of Heliodorus’s fourth-century Aethiopica generally hewed close to this sanctioned practice.⁶⁹ Then, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, a new formal possibility was devised that ended up mostly displacing the older method of composition. This innovation is the pseudofactual posture: novels were no longer spun around legendary heroes, they took the form of memoirs, letters, or occasionally eyewitness histories by or about contemporaries of whom no one had heard. No conceptual mutation was necessary for this new phase or regime—just a set of forms offering, as we’ll see, concrete advantages over previous forms. Then, around the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a last change—last in the sense that I think we are still in it, not last in the sense of perfect or final. This change is what I’m calling fiction—works that make no bones about their invention despite being set within contemporary reality. (This last trait clearly separates fiction from the “fanciful” genres of the fairy tale or the oriental tale, as well as from allegory.) And as with the pseudofactual novel, represented chiefly by first-person forms, a specific form characterizes the fictional novel—a type of third-person narration that was more or less unexploited before this period. (As my Conclusion will suggest, the fictional novel also makes new use of the first-person forms associated with the pseudofactual regime.)

I call each of these periods regimes. The term must not be confused with Kuhnian “paradigms” or Foucault’s “epistemes”—ways of thinking or modes of knowledge production that shift. In fact, even the common vocabulary of “shifting” is out of place, for it yokes us to modeling cultural change along the lines of sudden and unpredictable tectonic movement. Regimes do change, and the change may possibly (but not necessarily) be abrupt. This is not to say, however, that human cognition makes a leap, only that people’s literary behavior changes—generally speaking. “Generally” is a loose word, purposely on the opposite end of the spectrum from “shift.” Its looseness is not designed to protect my theory from the vagaries of history, which is to say, from troublesome counterexamples. In fact, it is inseparable from what I mean by a regime. Let’s take a closer look at the Aristotelian one.

Aristotle mentions Agathon’s tragedy Antheus as proof that the genre did not need to concern itself with real people; the Greek novels of Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others set invented characters loose in a recognizable Mediterranean landscape. Greeks and Romans, just like early modern readers, were hardly conceptually short-changed or congenitally literal-minded. They could well imagine invented characters. But, they reasoned, why bother with them? Like many other ancient works, Antheus is lost, yet this particular loss is emblematic of a persistent disinterest in characters with no historical sanction. Most commentators were much less forgiving than Aristotle on this point, even when they were Aristotelians: when examples of made-up narratives were there to be denigrated, they were. Macrobius treated Petronius’s and Apuleius’s works as childish fables; the emperor Julian in the fourth century firmly rejected the Greek romances that were nothing but spurious history.⁷⁰ (Comedy always constituted an exception: it was the one place where pure invention did not bring down upon the poet charges of irrelevance, though it did of course make the genre an also-ran to epic and tragedy in terms of prestige. I will postpone consideration of comic types until Chapter 3.) Of course, some people must have enjoyed these writings, but given the widespread opprobrium—which meant that cultural prestige did not accrue to works not dealing with real heroes—it is no wonder more writers did not push further in this direction.

If the Aristotelian critical tradition did not sanction the use of invented heroes, this was not because they didn’t have the right “mental equipment,”⁷¹ but—much less dramatically—because they reasoned that heroes should be taken from history. As we’ve seen, Aristotle’s treatise did not set history and literature as two opposite poles—what moderns might want to call the poles of fact and fiction. On the contrary, literature was what poets made of the gaps in history, and conversely, as Lionel Gossman has emphatically put it, “History was a branch of literature.”⁷² Antheus was only an exception to what would become one of the essential rationales for historical subject matter: poets use historical figures, Aristotle wrote, “because it is what is possible that arouses conviction, and … what did happen is clearly possible, since it would not have happened if it were not.”⁷³ Aristotle was not necessarily the root of the belief in the superiority of historical subjects; after all, the author of the Poetics described an existent state of affairs, and one which may well have characterized other pre-modern cultures as well.⁷⁴ Moreover, even in the Middle Ages when direct Aristotelian influence was sparse, history remained at the core of many prestigious poetic forms.⁷⁵ This enduring bent, combined with the prestige of Aristotle upon the Renaissance rediscovery of his Poetics, explains why early modern thinkers returned again and again to the historical core of poetry, or at least important poetry: the object of imitation needed to be a real one if the audience was to be persuaded and moved. The Spanish humanist Vives put the matter this way in 1522: “Those who are called ‘poets’ in Greek may relate whatever distortions and embellishments of truth that public fame (that monster of many heads) has concocted. But he who makes up the whole of what he tells is to be thought [more] a fool, or rather a liar, than a poet.”⁷⁶ And well over two hundred years later Fielding was still stressing, however ironically, Tom Jones’s conformity with “that universal Contempt, which the World … have cast on all historical Writers, who do not draw their Materials from Records.”⁷⁷

Dissenters, naturally, dissented. Sidney, with his oft-cited separation of poetry from history (in The Apologie for Poetry, c. 1583), was one. Rabelais, Ariosto, and Spenser are hardly orthodox Aristotelians (even if, as I’ve briefly suggested, they do not give history as short a shrift as might be supposed). Yet the Aristotelian line only hardened in the seventeenth century, as is evidenced by an evolution I’ve alluded to: imitating the Greek novel, which did not use characters of renown, French romance writers gave it a historical inflection.⁷⁸ Upon its appearance in Amyot’s French translation of 1547, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica was praised by humanists for reasons we will see in Chapter 2. While its nonhistorical subject matter was not an insurmountable barrier to appreciation, it did restrict the work’s claim to our attention by eliminating, Amyot reasoned in his preface, any possible utility: the Aethiopica was nothing more than good leisure reading for the fatigued humanist scholar.⁷⁹ Unsurprisingly, then, imparting prestige to romance in the Heliodorian model required beefing up its historical credentials. “[When] lies are made openly, such crude falsity makes no impression on the soul, and gives no pleasure,” wrote Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in the preface to their romance Ibrahim (1641–44); “how can I be touched by the misfortunes of the Queen of Guindaye, or of the King of Astrobatia, since I know that their kingdoms are nowhere on the universal map, or more precisely, in the realm of things?”⁸⁰ Romance was thus made to conform to general neoclassical arguments about verisimilitude, summed up in the formulation of Boileau, “The spirit is not moved by what it does not believe.”⁸¹ And early aesthetic speculation—in contradistinction to Kantian or Hegelian thought—built on the primacy of history by conceiving of art as an ersatz experience of reality, as a simulation or illusion. The theories of Burke, which I’ve mentioned in the context of Richardson’s editorial posture, are merely one late variant on this line of thought, in which illusion, necessarily imperfect, grounds the efficacy of the spectacle.⁸² The Marquis d’Argens, in his 1739 “Discours sur les nouvelles,” protested that he didn’t see why readerly involvement was discouraged by openly invented characters: “The author of a romance or a novel (un roman ou une nouvelle) has had enough genius to imagine a plot (un sujet), to decorate it with the circumstances that captivate and move the soul of the reader. So why can’t he invent names? What prevents him?”⁸³ Nothing except tradition.

And in a sense, even tradition doesn’t prevent authors of any period from inventing their protagonists. Tradition, after all, is merely a mass of practices and beliefs that individuals may reject or modify as they see fit. The question is whether such inevitable variation, which may remain strictly individual or possibly resolve into subpractices (like the Greek novel itself), causes a change in dominant practices. In some cases the answer must be yes, in others no. It probably depends on being in the right place at the right time with the right invention.

Here the example of the pseudofactual’s leading edge is relevant. The pretense of truth was not new to the years around 1670: Cervantes claimed to discover and translate a chronicle relating the life of Don Quixote, and any number of writers had offered “true stories”—of capital crimes, say, or of fantastic voyages—for the edification or amazement of their readers. But around 1670 in France the traditional contents of the novel—quite simply, love and adventure—are poured into a number of new forms. The first epistolary novels, for instance: Lettres portugaises (1669), commonly attributed to Guilleragues; or Le Portefeuille (1674), by Villedieu. Early memoir novels: Villedieu’s La Vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, which I’ve mentioned; Bremond’s Mémoires galants (1680); Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de Mr L.C.D.R. (1687). Novels, often cast as long letters to a friend, purporting to recount various adventures recently befallen the writer or people in the writer’s circle: Préchac’s Voyage de Fontainebleau (1678); Murat’s Voyage de campagne (1699). And finally the aforementioned historical novella: Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672), Boursault’s Le Prince de Condé (1675). As I will show in Chapter 1, this last form, though often taken for a key step toward novelistic modernity, was in fact composed along well-trodden Aristotelian lines (it focused on attested heroes from the European past), and at any rate had no posterity (by 1700 the subgenre is exhausted). But the other forms offered something Aristotelian invention did not. They made a place for writers, from bourgeois hacks to aristocratic women, who were not poets in the old, classically trained sense; and readers who read for leisure and not for learning could read about themselves rather than figures of the remote past.

The pseudofactual posture, then, had advantages. By allowing writers to set their stories in the present, it permitted a much more direct commentary on contemporary life.⁸⁴ Novelists were endlessly concerned with how they could use their works to make not only general ethical claims (which of course continued to be explored), but also to raise problems foreign to the figures bequeathed by history. If you wanted to address issues such as the institutions of marriage and slavery, the mores of Paris or London, social prejudice, political chicanery, and the abuses of the Church, then the benefits of the pseudofactual novel were clear. Another advantage to the mode was that at bottom it provided new forms without breaking with the long-established historical bent of Aristotelian poetics. Some violence was done to the common idea that the more illustrious the protagonist, the more forceful and prestigious the artwork: Defoe’s Roxana, certainly, is no Orestes. But what was lost in pedigree was gained in illusory immediacy, since readers were given to read not a poet’s invention, written in the blanks of history, but the hero’s own writing. Total belief was not required: Richardson’s letter to Warburton demonstrates that illusion was not held to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Nonetheless, whatever belief there was (and the more, the better) was envisioned as a species of the belief we have in historical discourse—literal belief with something subtracted, as it were, rather than a special type of belief reserved for literature. Granted, the epistolary novel marks quite a change from the epic; but at the same time, Richardson’s pseudofactual stance toward the reality of Clarissa’s letters does not bring us very far from Aristotle, for whom what has actually happened guarantees conviction.

The pseudofactual form, once invented, prospered because it offered something to writers and readers. But invention is necessary, and this was the case with fictional forms as well. The pseudofactual novel features either a real person narrating his or her own deeds, or a real person narrating the deeds of real people. No one believes in all these “real people,” of course, but everyone agrees to pretend. Why can’t the pretense be dropped, given that no one believes it? Partially because of the rationales I’ve outlined, but also, no doubt, because the pretense derives from the forms themselves—from the letters, the memoirs, the biographies, the true histories. The fictional novel requires a new form of third-person narration. Pseudofactual third-person narrators recount a story of which they are not part; but because they pretend write what they have seen or heard, they belong to the same “storyworld” as the characters. The third-person narrators of fiction, by contrast, are not part of the storyworld of their novels; in many cases they are invisible, and the story seems to be somehow telling itself. But even when narrators are intrusive in their use of the word “I,” the “I” is no longer that of Behn or Fielding, no more than it recalls the much older poet-bard of, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1383) or the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Rather, it belongs to an author-narrator who invents the persons and actions of which he or she writes. The novel that seems to tell itself and the novel told by an author-narrator who is in no way a “witness”: obviously these techniques open up new vistas for the genre. But they are, precisely, techniques, not a timeless narrative option that Richardson or Rousseau chose not to employ. The eighteenth-century novel’s inertia was not conceptual, but formal. Appropriating real-world discursive forms was the only game in town—at least until writers started to experiment with other possibilities and slowly stretched the bounds of what the novel could do.⁸⁵

What is a literary regime, then? A dominant practice, modifiable over time, that corresponds to what enough people want their literature to do. Such a qualified proposition may seem toothless. It would be much better for the prestige of literary historians if something more dramatic were afoot—a change in worldview, a cultural mutation, a revolution in what is thinkable by humans, all registered first by the Geiger-like sensitivity of the literary work. And being able to read in the too-well-known pages of the canon the secret correspondences between novels and other apparently separate domains—this cements the critic’s ingenuity. Fiction’s advent has been tied in this way to momentous transformations and hidden causes. For Michael McKeon, nuancing Ian Watt’s argument that novels reflected a new empirical philosophical stance, the genre has to steer a dialectical path between the rock of empiricism and the hard place of skepticism, arriving at fiction as a soft middle ground. For Foley, realist fiction is logically subtended by a new vision of history. Gallagher looks away from philosophy and toward economics, suggesting that fiction follows from developments in capitalism, notably the use of credit.⁸⁶ John Bender prefers to underline fiction’s congruence with the scientific hypothesis.⁸⁷ I am certainly not prepared to deny a certain Lockean je ne sais quoi about the pseudofactual novel, especially since it is not hard to find corroboration that in the early modern period a qualitatively new form of discursive referentiality—what Timothy Reiss dubs “analytico-referential discourse”—replaced the textual practices of humanism or scholasticism, rooted in the citation of prior authorities.⁸⁸ And discourses do interpenetrate. Fielding, trained as a lawyer, integrated legal standards of proof into Tom Jones⁸⁹; Zola’s interest in the experimental science of Claude Bernard is a still more obvious example. But this is another order of link than the one proposed by the above scholars. Rarely content with demonstrable influence or seeking to leverage it into something grander, practitioners of Cultural Studies especially posit something more like a form of “magical ‘sympathy’” between otherwise disparate cultural manifestations.⁹⁰ To be sure, if we get sufficiently abstract about what fiction “is,” then yes, we will start to notice suggestive resemblances with any number of other cultural elements. But this is not evidence of a link; it is evidence of the human propensity to see patterns—to assume the islands of data are subtended by a common conceptual or logical substrate. I am as intrigued by coincidences as anyone—by the fact, say, that Kant defines the judgment of taste as being “indifferent as regards the existence of an object” precisely in 1790, which is to say the moment properly fictional forms started to multiply.⁹¹ Nevertheless, the present study simply resists the temptation to link fiction to the domains of philosophy, science, economics, law, and so on.

Before Fiction remains focused, rather, on the nuts and bolts of literary form. My intraliterary preoccupations do not mean that I regard literature as autonomous or absolute in the common modern sense. After all, the fact that the writers of the period I deal with attributed to literature effects both moral and emotional implies something far from aesthetic autonomy (art-for-art’s sake), disinterestedness (art is for the mind not the senses), or self-referentiality (the medium is the message). Literary form, therefore, is not an aesthetic but morphological matter. If we stop asking what the novel is a “sign of,” an array of interesting and nearly unasked questions come into view—questions that have little to do with those old studies that simply grouped novels into waxing and waning subgenres or schools. Here are a few. When do individual innovations modify communal practice and when don’t they? Do inherited forms possess a kind of inertia, or, reformulated slightly, might literature show signs of “path-dependence”? If so, what is necessary for a new formal regime to overcome an old one? Is formal evolution continuous, or marked by plateaus and breaks, or a combination of both? Which possibility fits the data better: does an earlier form “turn into” a later form, or is the later form actually a competitor, coming to dominate and displace the other because it is better at doing certain things? Does a given form imply a content, or can new forms simply serve as vehicles for the same old preoccupations? Or do we observe a lag between the new form and the subsequent exploitation of the possibilities it offers—as when Walter Benjamin describes the use of iron in the nineteenth century at first mimicking familiar materials and then, slowly, permitting heretofore impossible constructions?⁹² Are literary forms, instead of being possibilities that any writer can pull out of the air when needed, something more like technologies—devices that need to be invented and then worked on by their inventor and the inventor’s competitors? What would a history of the novel written as a history of forms, as a morphological history, look like?

For better or worse, it wouldn’t look entirely like Before Fiction, which at its origin was conceived much along the lines of the histories I have come to critique. This book carries in its structure—chapters on individual novelists strung together like chronological pearls—the trace of a mode of inquiry that the actual works, once contextualized, invalidated. But form, no more than biology, is not destiny, and the six case studies that follow no longer point to something “happening” underneath or around them. On the contrary, they show rather clearly that apart from some local skirmishes, nothing is happening, in the sense that fiction is not coming into being. Maybe elsewhere it is—I doubt it—but not in the texts I have selected. If we want to know how fictional forms came to dominate the novel, then we need to study the spread of their devices—notably, as I’ve hinted and as I will sketch out further in the Conclusion, the use of omniscient narration. That would require, obviously, a quite different type of study, one in which unusual individual works would fade into the background.⁹³ So, because a few isolated cases, contextualized or not, can’t add up to a history of communal practices, Before Fiction is only a prolegomenon to a future history that one day may offer a more adequate understanding of the various succeeding and competing forms the novel has taken.